Steven Cohen2015-08-02T19:25:53-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=steven-cohenCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Steven CohenGood old fashioned elbow grease.Post-Sandy Rebuilding for Resiliency: Lessons From Long Beach, NYtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.78785562015-07-27T10:06:24-04:002015-07-27T10:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
All over town there are the sounds and sights of revival. The movie theatre has finally reopened. Construction workers and cement trucks are everywhere and many new homes have been built and sold. By the second summer after Sandy the boardwalk had been rebuilt, and today it's better than ever. The entire boardwalk now does double duty as a sea wall. Dunes have been rebuilt, dune grass has regrown and in the parts of Long Beach that do not face the boardwalk, new wooden ramps and walkways have been built to allow people to walk over the dunes without damaging them. Trees have been replanted. A new bike share company has installed racks of bikes on the boardwalk.

Long Beach's capable and competent city manager, Jack Schnirman, has engaged the entire community in a planning process to add new amenities and possibly commercial spaces to the boardwalk. Long Beach has a "council-manager" form of government which means that the partisan city council sets policy direction for a non-partisan city manager, who runs the place day-to-day. Sometimes the system works, sometimes it doesn't. It is Long Beach's good fortune that we are in one of those periods when the system is working.

When the weather has been warm and sunny this summer the place has been jammed with visitors. The beaches of Long Beach, like some of the beaches in New York City, are within walking distance of a train. It is a short walk from the Long Island Rail Road station to the boardwalk and by the looks of things the Manhattanites have returned in force. On most days you can see them stream out of the Long Beach train station with surfboards, coolers and beach chairs and march to the beach.

It is not that people have gotten amnesia and don't remember the damage of Hurricane Sandy. Some homes are still being rebuilt and some people are still displaced. Moreover, the people who lead the shore towns in Long Island and New Jersey are speaking the language of climate resiliency. They know they must rebuild to withstand stronger and more frequent storms. Old political battles about sacrificing dune protection to enable better ocean views have faded. We can always walk to the beach to see the ocean. The nagging fear of the next storm is not far from people's minds and is still discussed and considered in decision-making. Each hurricane season that passes without a superstorm is cause for a collective sigh of relief.

But as I expected in the aftermath of the storm, these communities simply mean too much to too many people to just fade away. I thought the personal memories of ocean breezes and of family and friends gathering would be too strong to resist, but it is much deeper than that. People were unwilling to give up a way of life. In Long Beach, the storm resulted in a revival of community spirit and a temporary decline in partisanship as people realized that more united them than divided them. It wasn't just President Obama and Governor Christie working together in the wake of the storm - it was everyone. That was a factor I had not considered as I assessed the politics of reconstruction after Sandy. I knew people would not leave, but the positive energy that has emerged after the storm has been a pleasant surprise. People came together and helped each other and as they returned to their homes they reconnected with their love of their community. What had once been an ordinary gathering for a summer barbeque became something to reflect on thankfully and to savor.

Long Beach had an earlier "Kumbaya" moment in the 1980s when another nonpartisan and competent city manager, Ed Eaton, helped bring the town together and brought it back from near death. Both Schnirman and Eaton worked with business and community leaders to build consensus and move the town forward. Just as Senator Pothole (Al D'Amato) helped bring home federal assistance in the 1980s; his successor Chuck Schumer has played the same role in bringing federal funds to the town after Sandy. Those federal funds made the reconstruction of public facilities possible.

There are many parts of the restoration of the shore that could have been done better. It took some people far too long to receive the funding they needed to rebuild their homes. Certainly Coney Island and the Rockaways could have been rebuilt faster and Rockaway still has a way to go. The public housing in these neighborhoods needed renovation before the storm and still needs massive work today. But what has been striking and perhaps surprising has been the grassroots community spirit that has been sparked in many of these neighborhoods as they have rebuilt after the storm. It is an important factor to consider as our communities develop resiliency plans and prepare for storms to come.

There is a human dimension to climate adaptation that needs to be factored into resiliency planning and programs. People value their homes and are often emotionally attached to their communities. Some psychologists even speak about a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder that was caused by displacement after the storm. The other side of that trauma for some people seemed to be a period of reflection where they started to consider the community's needs along with their own needs. That in turn created a political force that pushed the reconstruction and revival of these shore communities.

All over America we see the impact of floods, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes and other forms of natural disasters driving people from their homes and communities. Some of this is related to climate change causing changing patterns of rainfall and more intense storms. But some of this damage is also due to our patterns of land use development and the fact that we live in places that we didn't live in fifty or one hundred years ago. I continue to believe that we need to recognize this fact of American life and create a form of federal reconstruction insurance to provide guaranteed funding to rebuild communities after disaster has struck. We cannot leave reconstruction finance in the unsteady hands of the U.S. Congress.

In Long Beach it has taken three years and intense political advocacy to fund reconstruction and to rebuild homes, businesses and infrastructure. Security in one's home is the irreducible central function of government. The value of effectively performing that function can be seen on the streets, boardwalk, and beaches of this town. The job now is to make sure that reconstruction becomes a right rather than a privilege.]]>Coal Miners, Extractive Industries, and a Sustainable Economytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.78318102015-07-20T08:39:14-04:002015-07-20T09:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/Clifford Krauss wrote an excellent report on the hurt and dislocation being caused by the declining coal industry. According to Krauss:

There is pain across the nation's coal fields, but here in West Virginia, the disruption is particularly acute. Mines are closing almost every month. Sawmills that provide wooden support beams for the tunnels are lying off workers, and diners are putting up signs asking their customers to pray for the miners. The coal industry, long the heart that pumped the economy here, is in deep trouble, buffeted by power plants switching to cheap natural gas, crippling debt, mounting foreign competition and increasingly strict regulations to limit greenhouse gases and toxic emissions like mercury.

Krauss notes that U.S. coal production is down and its share of the energy market is being reduced by natural gas and renewables. From the climate perspective this is good news; for workers in West Virginia coal towns, this is bad news. The problem for West Virginia and Kentucky is not the "war on coal" that the right wing blames on President Obama, but a declining resource-extraction industry that is being displaced by new technology.

In a modern economy, rapidly changing technologies can have a negative impact on workers. The guys that used to unload ships on the west side of Manhattan were thrown out of work when containerized port facilities opened in Newark. The people who worked in Blockbuster Video and Tower Records lost their jobs to online music and videos. The list of lost jobs is nearly endless. The issue is: what is society's responsibility to help those who suffer the impact of these changes?

The impact of new technologies on jobs is unavoidable, and not all of the news is bad. Many old jobs are destroyed but many new jobs are created. The problem is that with weak unions, global competition and inadequate wage regulation, some of the new jobs are lower paid than the old jobs. The new jobs that pay well often require specialized training and education that is not easy for miners to access.

Installing solar panels, operating energy efficiency equipment and building micro-grids all create new opportunities. While these may help the coal miners willing to move to the places that have those opportunities, or are able to obtain additional education, they will not help the communities that once relied on the coal industry for jobs and money. Community redevelopment requires that new industries be attracted to replace the old ones that are in decline. Creating the conditions to attract new businesses is more art and craft than science. It requires a sophisticated public-private partnership that is often blocked by our intense but outmoded political ideologies.

Here in New York City, efforts to use our universities to attract new businesses are underway in upstate New York and on Roosevelt Island in New York City. The effort in New York City is slowly taking shape as Cornell University and the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology partner to create Cornell Tech, a school devoted to applying cutting edge technologies to business applications in health care, media and the built environment. In addition to Cornell, Columbia, NYU and CUNY are all building "STEM" (science, technology, engineering, math) programs.

In upstate New York, under Governor Andrew Cuomo's persistent prodding, the State University of New York is much further along in its effort to transform upstate New York's moribund economy by building high-technology capacity. In September 2014, the state merged SUNY's nanotechnology college with its Institute of Technology to create the SUNY Polytechnic Institute. According to the press release at the time of the merger:

SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) is New York's globally recognized, high-tech educational ecosystem, formed from the merger of the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering and SUNY Institute of Technology. SUNY Poly offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in the emerging disciplines of nanoscience and nanoengineering, as well as cutting-edge nanobioscience and nanoeconomics programs at its Albany campus, and degrees in technology, professional studies, and the arts and sciences at its Utica/Rome campus. As the world's most advanced, university-driven research enterprise, SUNY Poly boasts more than $20 billion in high-tech investments, over 300 corporate partners, and maintains a statewide footprint. The 1.3 million-square-foot Albany NanoTech megaplex is home to more than 3,100 scientists, researchers, engineers, students, faculty, and staff. The Utica/Rome campus offers a unique high-tech learning environment... SUNY Poly operates the Smart Cities Technology Innovation Center (SCiTI) at Kiernan Plaza in Albany, the Solar Energy Development Center in Halfmoon, the Photovoltaic Manufacturing and Technology Development Facility in Rochester, and the Smart System Technology and Commercialization Center (STC) in Canandaigua. SUNY Poly founded and manages the Computer Chip Commercialization Center (Quad-C) on its Utica campus, and is lead developer of the Marcy Nanocenter site, as well as the Buffalo High-Tech Manufacturing Complex, Buffalo Information Technologies Innovation and Commercialization Hub, and Medical Innovation and Commercialization Hub.

It is far too early to know if these new educational institutions can stimulate economic growth, create employment, and sustain it long-term. But at least New York City and New York State are attempting to take the institutions they have and provide incentives for them to connect with industry and develop facilities, trained staff and an exciting environment to encourage investment.

While New York City's economy is doing much better than the upstate economy, we are still only four decades from near bankruptcy. When Mike Bloomberg was mayor, he was particularly concerned about the need to diversify the city's economy and attract high-tech businesses here. New York City has an exciting environment that attracts talent. Upstate New York and West Virginia may not have the city's nightlife and excitement, but they also don't have our high cost of doing business. They can offer lower land and building costs and, if an effort is made to leverage university resources, the possibility of a trained workforce. In New York we see an effort to leverage resources and create a sophisticated public-private partnership.

What about West Virginia? Decades ago, I spent my first year as an assistant professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Even then, it was a large, comprehensive university. Today, it is clearly an asset that can play a role in transitioning the state's economy. The university's website indicates that this is understood on campus and declares that:

It would be hard to find a university as committed to making a difference to its state as West Virginia University is to West Virginia. As our state, nation, and the world transition to a knowledge-based economy, the role of higher education, which is "the original knowledge industry," will become even more critical. WVU's responsibility has never been more important, and our ability to spark innovation and the jobs and opportunities it produces has never been needed as much as it now.

However, while Mike Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo invested scarce public resources in building high-tech university hubs, West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin leads a poorer state with far less ability to invest in the infrastructure of the brain-based economy. West Virginia is struggling to keep its roads paved, an even more fundamental requirement for economic development.

For the workers in the mines and workers all over America faced with a transitioning economy, we need a better response to tough times than a wish and a prayer. The transition to a global economy is well underway and the transition to a sustainable economy has begun. The human cost of this transition should not be ignored and requires determined and creative solutions. In my view, that does not mean we need big, bureaucratized government programs, but it does mean we need an assertive state and local government working in partnership with the private sector. Just as the federal government declares a state eligible for special emergency assistance during a natural emergency, we need a national program to help geographic areas that are hit with financial emergencies measured by specific unemployment thresholds. Funding to help states attract businesses and for universities to partner with business should be made available to help states like West Virginia transition from declining to growing businesses.]]>Removing Toxic Electronics From NYC's Wastetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.77842462015-07-13T08:42:09-04:002015-07-13T08:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
Here in New York City, efforts to regulate and manage electronic waste began during Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC program and continue under Mayor de Blasio's OneNYC. This past January, New York City and New York State instituted a ban on disposing electronic waste in regular garbage disposal. New Yorkers who toss their iPhone into the garbage could be subject to a $100 fine.

In New York City, the Sanitation Department does not provide regularly scheduled pickup of electronic waste and since many apartment dwellers do not own autos, disposing larger pieces of electronic waste legally may be infeasible or at least inconvenient. In response, the city's Sanitation Department has developed a program that works with apartment buildings to collect electronic waste. In a story on the new electronic waste program filed just prior to program implementation, Capital New York's David Giambusso observed that:

While the city will not provide curbside pick-up, 90 locations throughout the city, including Best Buy and Staples stores and the Salvation Army will accept discarded electronics. In partnership with Electronic Recyclers International, the city began a preliminary collection program in November 2013 at apartment buildings. Buildings provide rooms or large bins for residents to toss their old devices. Alternately, buildings can schedule specific days for collection.

This coming Wednesday, New York City government and a variety of stakeholders will convene a press conference to brag about the results of the first six months of the electronic waste ban. This event and others to follow will help address the concern that many people do not know about the "e-waste" ban. It also signifies an important commitment by New York City and New York State to addressing this very serious problem. What makes it even more significant is that this policy is an example of New Yorkers addressing the impact of pollution we create, even though we do not directly experience the impact of e-waste pollution. Since none of New York City's garbage is landfilled or burned within the city, the toxics the city is controlling will benefit people living in other states that either landfill or burn New York's waste.

This points to the need for all of us to understand the interconnectedness of our system of production and consumption and the need to develop system-wide solutions to system-level problems. Consumers alone cannot address the issue of electronic waste. The companies that manufacture and sell these devices must play a key role. I won't get into the short product lifecycle of iPhones or their planned obsolescence, but if these products are going to be replaced with such great frequency then Apple and its competitors must design the phones to be easily disassembled for raw materials or components to be used in other devices. This effort to recycle should become a design parameter for engineers working on the next generation of electronic toys. In addition, companies should be offering bounties for consumers to trade in their old model to receive a discount on the new one. The production chain from producer to market should become a closed loop, with the product going back to the manufacturer or to an organization capable of making some use of it.

I suspect that the pattern we have recently seen with personal computers may become more prevalent with smart phones and other technologies. PCs have become commodities which have few distinguishing features. The exciting new consumer uses will increasingly be seen in software changes rather than new hardware. That may have the effect of reducing the rapid increase in electronic waste volume. Of course, the growing market for electronics in the developing world will offset some of that environmental benefit.

The move by New York City and actions that demonstrate producer responsibility by some electronics manufacturers are important steps in addressing the complex problem of electronic waste. It is important to understand that these electronic devices are not going away. They have been woven into the fabric of life here in New York City and all over the world. People expect to have easy access to information and to have the ability to communicate instantly with friends, family and business associates all over the world. Walking down a busy street in New York, you inevitably see people looking down into these small rectangular boxes and pretty much ignoring the world buzzing by them. Instead of looking up the street to find the nearest pizza place, they look down to see what Yelp or Google has to say.

We need to develop the public policies and standard operating procedures to make certain that discarded electronics are either recycled or carefully discarded. This requires that we abandon the idea that "out of sight is out of mind." When a toxic is out of sight, it is a danger because we don't know where it has gone and who might suffer from exposure. We also need to pay more attention to the use of toxic chemicals in routine production. Again, engineers need to be given the design parameter to avoid the use of toxics whenever possible. This is not a simple matter. Sometimes a toxic chemical can help reduce energy use and so you are trading off toxics against greenhouse gases. What we need is an awareness of the human and natural systems that this product will interact with and the impact of those interactions. In many cases these factors are ignored as not relevant to the design issues at hand. The result is that we are forced to develop end-of-pipeline solutions such as New York's ban on electronic waste.

This is not to minimize the importance of banning electronic waste from the general waste stream. Banning e-waste will have a positive impact. People will think about the toxics in the products they buy and may be open to paying for non-toxic electronics. Fewer of the products will end up in mixed garbage, making household waste disposal less dangerous.

New York City deserves great credit for developing and implementing this program, and addressing the city's unique circumstances while doing it. Waste disposal in an apartment is very different than in a single family home. In an apartment, all the garbage goes into a single set of communal bins and you really can't tell where the garbage came from. An iPhone in my apartment building's trashcans can originate from any one of over 50 apartments. If the Sanitation Department found a piece of e-waste in our garbage, they would have a difficult time figuring out who to fine. By making it easy for apartment dwellers to dispose of their old electronics, New York City has built an intelligent and realistic program to reduce the presence of electronic waste in our waste stream.]]>Sustainability Policy Is Taking Hold in Chinatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.77350642015-07-06T09:08:59-04:002015-07-06T09:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
Last week, my colleague Dr. Dong Guo and I spoke at two conferences in China on our collaboration with the China Center for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE). We are engaged in a multi-year effort to begin the development of a shared set of sustainability metrics. One of the first products of that collaboration is a framework for urban sustainability focused on Chinese cities, which we presented at CCIEE's biennial summit. At this high-profile economic policy conference focused on sustainability, we also learned that the new Asia Development Bank created by China would lend capital according to green principles. This movement to sustainability and our participation at the summit was noted in a blog post by Earth Institute researcher Kelsie DeFrancia. According to DeFrancia:

Last weekend, Earth Institute executive director Steven Cohen and post-doctoral research scholar Dong Guo participated in the Fourth Global Think Tank Summit in Beijing, hosted by the China Center for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE). CCIEE, the preeminent think tank in China headed by the former vice premier, hosted hundreds of politicians, scholars, business leaders, and experts from nearly 30 countries at the summit. For the first time, the biennial summit focused on promoting global sustainable development, showing that China is recognizing the significance of this important field. In a session on "Green Growth," Cohen shared his expertise on sustainability and developing a green economy alongside leaders from China, Europe, and the United States, including Fredd Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Amory Lovins, co-founder, chairman emeritus, and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Following this landmark event, our next stop was in the fast growing Chinese city of Guiyang where several thousand people were attending the annual Eco Forum Global conference, where I also delivered remarks at its closing ceremony. Our Columbia colleague Dr. Satyajit Bose joined us at this conference and participated in a series of wide-ranging discussions on sustainability policy and management. This second conference was devoted to environmental issues, and the scale was something you do not see often in the United States; I can't remember when an environmental conference here caused traffic jams or helped sell out hotels. In the U.S., this kind of congestion takes place at climate marches and anti-pollution demonstrations, but not at conferences when people are delivering academic papers and giving policy speeches.

I believe we are seeing Chinese economic and public policy pivoting to address the damage to health and the environment that has been endured during the massive development push of the past quarter-century. While that push is far from over, those in power have decided that it is time to direct a greater national effort to preserving and protecting natural resources, while continuing economic growth. The thick black haze that frequently settles over some Chinese cities provides ample rationale for this effort. People in China know that they must pay attention to the damage they are doing to their land, air and water.

The lesson that the United States and Europe may offer is that it is possible to continue to grow the GDP while reducing the absolute level of pollution. This is because pollution control and pollution prevention adds to economic activity and can modernize the technological base of production. It must be paid for, but particularly when pollution control is not an end of pipeline retrofit, pollution control can reduce costs by reducing waste. This is most obviously the case with energy efficiency. Saved energy is obviously saved money. The idea that we must trade off the environment against economic growth is incorrect. First, we have demonstrated it is possible to reduce pollution while growing the economy. Second, the cost of repairing damage to the air, water and land must inevitably be paid. Think of it as a form of deferred maintenance. You can patch the roof once or twice, but eventually the patch no longer holds. If we poison our own well water, eventually we either have to filter the water or dig another well. The principle is pay now or pay later. The costs of preventing damage are typically lower than the costs of repair or reconstruction.

The massive development effort now underway in China is hard to miss. The skyline is dotted with scores of construction cranes as new and larger buildings are built. China's ability to focus national effort in a single direction is obvious. Nevertheless, with all this development underway and all this money being made, it is east to suspect that the longer term perspective required for sustainability will not survive. It is possible that the pressure to develop rapidly coupled with the desire to make a quick buck (or more specifically a quick Yuan) will dominate the desire to breathe.

I hope not and I suspect that the forces of sustainability have the upper hand. A civilization that has been around for thousands of years has a sense of history and may be more capable of patience than our own still relatively new nation. As in the United States, young people are a major force behind the move to protect the environment. The carelessness of some industrial practices and the lack of regulatory enforcement are visible to the eye and obvious to anyone's respiratory system. These facts are creating the same type of political pressure that resulted in the move to protect the environment in the United States during the 1970s. Although our political systems are radically different, the need for political and economic elites to respond to the demand for change is the same.

As I often say, while rich and powerful people can insulate themselves from many environmental insults, they cannot avoid all of them. In the end, human biology unites us. The rich and powerful are the same organisms as the poor and powerless. Moreover, sustainability management is teaching us that we can develop our economy and live well, while preserving the planet. It is a matter of focusing human brainpower and ingenuity on the problem of producing the food, water, energy and other consumer items we need and want while damaging the planet as little as possible.

I left China encouraged by the widespread receptivity to the theory and practice of sustainability, but aware of the huge challenge that lies ahead. As we flew from Guiyang to Beijing for the return flight home, I looked down and saw a countryside dotted with scores of windmills. The transition from a coal-based economy to a renewable one will not be simple or quick -- but it has begun. The challenges of ensuring that there will be sufficient economic growth to reduce China's poverty rate is a profound one. While people may have been telling me what they knew I wanted to hear, I sensed a growing commitment to the goal of growing that economy without destroying China's natural environment. The related goal of developing a practical set of sustainability metrics is an indication of the seriousness of the effort. Once indicators are in place, we will have a better handle on how much of China's sustainability policy is talk and how much is action.

]]>Revising the Toxic Substances Out-of-Control Acttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.76865882015-06-29T08:38:47-04:002015-06-29T08:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
Last year, a chemical used to process coal leaked into the Elk River--a major source of Charleston, West Virginia's water supply. As a result, people went without tap water for several days. Charleston's water crisis placed the regulation of toxic chemicals back on the political agenda in Washington. In a piece on the latest efforts to modernize America's toxics law, Coral Davenport of the New York Times observed that:

Under the 1976 law, the Environmental Protection Agency is required to evaluate the safety of new chemicals introduced in the marketplace. But the agency was not required to evaluate the roughly 64,000 chemicals already being used in American commerce. Since then, about 22,000 new chemicals have been introduced and evaluated, and those that the agency designates as toxic and hazardous are subject to regulation. But the vast majority of chemicals -- including the one that fouled the Elk River, 4-methylcylcohexane methanol, or MCHM -- are unregulated, and little information about many of them is publicly available. Under current law, even asbestos, a known carcinogen, is exempt from regulation.

Under a very mild new law winding its way through Congress, EPA would be required to review the toxicity of 10 chemicals per year. This is a minuscule, almost absurd number when compared to the 64,000 unregulated chemicals now in use. The chemical industry and its lobbyists support this token effort and it is possible that it will be signed into law this summer.

My pragmatic side wants to say that controlling ten hazards is better than controlling none, but I'm not really sure that is true. Assuming we stop inventing new chemicals, it would take over 6,000 years to test the ones we have already created. Let's compare the process for introducing new chemicals to the one that the Food and Drug Administration requires before new drugs are allowed to be introduced in the United States. The introduction of new drugs must adhere to the precautionary principle. Before we allow drugs to be released for use by the public, we test them in the laboratory, then on animals, and then on humans. In contrast, new chemicals are introduced into use and only controlled if they have been proven to cause harm; many times, even after harm is proven they are allowed to continue. In most cases, we simply do not know if the chemicals are harmful.

Our regulation of toxic substances is based largely on ignorance and is inadequate and idiotic. The costs of testing for harm are not negligible, but are far lower than the cost of paying for toxic clean-up or for the cost of health care for those exposed to poison. The Natural Resources Defense Council's website succinctly summarizes the horrific state of toxics control in the United States:

Under the law now, the EPA must prove a chemical poses an "unreasonable risk" to public health or the environment before it can be regulated. Widely considered a failure, the law allowed 62,000 chemicals to remain on the market without testing when it first passed. In more than 30 years, the EPA has only required testing for about 200 of those chemicals, and has partially regulated just five. The rest have never been fully assessed for toxic impacts on human health and the environment. For the 22,000 chemicals introduced since 1976, chemical manufacturers have provided little or no information to the EPA regarding their potential health or environmental impacts.

The impacts of these toxics on our health are often difficult to measure. We are not always aware of the chemicals we come in contact with or the intensity of our exposure. Interactive effects are also difficult to trace. We learn that our workplaces and homes are more toxic than they once were when we need to renovate them or when a fire takes place. When we renovate a building and discover we need to remove asbestos from the walls, we are in effect undertaking a very expensive toxic clean-up. When fire fighters enter a burning home they are now required to wear breathing apparatuses to protect them from the toxic fumes that are emitted from burning furniture, counters and floor coverings. A half-century ago these building materials were made from organic matter: cotton, wool, wood, metal and stone. Today, we use more and more plastics in our interior finishes and furnishings.

I am not opposed to "better living through chemistry" and I am not looking to buy a wooden iPhone, but I do not understand why the chemical industry does not cooperate in an effort to ensure that the products they sell do not harm people and the planet. An unregulated chemical industry is an invitation for disaster. Fortunately, there is at least one place in America where regulation of toxic chemicals is taken seriously--California (of course). In 2013, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control began the phased implementation of its Safer Consumer Products Program. This program is designed to:

...reduce toxic chemicals in consumer products, create new business opportunities in the emerging safer consumer products economy, and reduce the burden on consumers and businesses struggling to identify what's in the products they buy for their families and customers. ...By shifting the question of an ingredient's toxicity to the product development stage, concerns can be addressed early on. The approach results in safer ingredients and designs, and provides an opportunity for California industry to once again demonstrate its innovative spirit by making products that meet consumer demand throughout the world.

California's program publishes a list of dangerous chemicals and targets a small number of products containing those chemicals. According to the Center for Public Integrity's Ronnie Greene:

Companies manufacturing those goods in California... launch detailed assessments to see whether safer chemicals are available and, if so, alter their products. The goal: To remove toxic chemicals from commerce and prompt industry to provide safe alternatives.

Greene notes that the American Chemistry Council, the group that has lobbied against federal toxics reform, also lobbied against California's new regulations. California's state government was able to overcome the interest group's efforts and create this modest new effort to regulate toxic chemicals.

California has long represented America's future. Its nearly 39 million people make it the largest state in the union, and it has been a trendsetter--both positive and negative. While it confronts gridlock on its freeways and a historic drought in its water supply, it is also home to Silicon Valley and remains a magnet for people from all over the world. Its environmental policies have long exceeded national requirements and I'm not surprised that it is a pioneer in toxic substances regulation.

On a more crowded planet with a higher level of consumption, we need to learn to use resources more wisely and exercise greater care when we use chemicals that can harm living organisms. The toxics in Charleston's water supply were a warning. If we want to ensure that it does not represent our environmental future, we should take the warning seriously.]]>The Centrality of Sustainabilitytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.76357662015-06-22T08:47:52-04:002015-06-22T13:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
The wanton and purposeless consumption of the planet's resources is unethical. Jim Yardley and Laurie Goldstein summarized the encyclical in the New York Times last week and reported that the pope's:

...most stinging rebuke is a broad economic and political critique of profit-seeking and the undue influence of technology on society. He praised the progress achieved by economic growth and technology, singling out achievements in medicine, science and engineering. But, he added, "Our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience.

I agree that we need to see growth and increased acceptance of values and conscience related to global sustainability, nevertheless, I see far more of that today than I have ever seen. Along with the growth of economic consumption we have seen the growth of an environmental ethic. Importantly, the environmental ethic is stronger in young people than in old people. Young people have grown up hearing about environmental issues, along with issues related to nutrition, physical fitness and public health. People are paying more attention to their own wellbeing and to the state of the planet. Many believe that their elders have destroyed the ecosystems that they will end up inheriting and that perception has created a sense of urgency about the sustainability of our planet and the global economy that we have built.

Young people are bringing sustainability to the center of the policy agenda, and to the center of the management agenda in the organizations they work for. In the workplace it is not unusual to see staff asking for "greener" workplaces--toxic-free workplaces that are energy and water efficient and that pay attention to the environmental impacts of the goods and services they produce. Large companies like Apple and Walmart have been greening their operations in response to both external market pressures and internal social demands within their organizations.

On the policy agenda, we are now seeing the governing elites in both China and India starting to focus on environmental quality. The connection between air quality, toxics, clean water and the public's health is clear to nearly everyone. One does not need to worry about the long-term impact of climate change to be concerned about breathing particulates from air pollution. All those people wearing masks on the street are not simply making a fashion statement; they are trying to protect their lungs. Sustainability has reached the center of our political agenda because all of us--rich and poor--are biological creatures. That is a fact. So too is the fact that the planet is getting more crowded and natural resources must now be shared among more and more people.

While it is helpful for the pope to define sustainability as a moral issue, my own take is that sustainability is a very practical management issue. We need to do a better job of exploiting the planet for our own use so that we can continue to use it without destroying the natural systems that sustain the planet's ecological resources. We preserve the planet not because we love it or because its destruction is unethical, but because we need it. While I personally love nature and consider its destruction unethical, I am not counting on my belief system to dominate. With apologies to the pope, I am counting on self-interest, perhaps of the slightly enlightened form, to deliver a sustainable and renewable economy.

We have learned that we can grow economically without adding to the planet's pollution load. We need to exercise greater care when we build our settlements and we need to use the best technology available to ensure that our waste products are suitable for some form of re-use rather than dumped into the ocean or into a hole in the ground. While it is critical to think about sustainability management as a moral imperative and helpful to integrate that into our sense of ethics and values, I believe that self-interest is also a force behind sustainability. It is true that short-term, rapid profit-taking is often done at the expense of environmental quality. But it is also true that long-term, growing and secure rates of return are best obtained through a management approach that places a higher value on maintaining environmental quality. Ask BP and GE if they wish they had been more careful in managing their operations as they pay billions of dollars to clean up the Gulf of Mexico and the Hudson River. Sometimes corporations manage to offload the costs of cleanup onto the rest of us, but at other times they get stuck with the bill. With drones, video cameras everywhere, and the relentless information machine of the World Wide Web, corporate misbehavior will be more and more difficult to hide.

When judging the competence of a corporate management team, investors are beginning to examine the organization's capacity to measure and manage its use of resources and its impact on the environment. When people and business are looking for places to move to or grow, they look at the adequacy of a jurisdiction's energy supply, water supply, air quality, transportation system, and overall quality of life. In a mobile global economy people can choose where they live or work.

The demand for sustainability is both the cause and effect of a number of facts of modern life, particularly: growing population, increased urbanization, increased use of natural resources, pollution, climate change, the political demand for economic development, inexpensive information and communication, and the growth of a connected global economic and communication system. These forces pretty much define the 21st century and the world we now live in.

There are many who consider the sustainability crisis so pressing that we do not have time to gradually and incrementally make the transition to a renewable resource-based sustainable economy. In fact, Vanessa Bobadilla and Erika Harris, two very talented students at NYU, recently reviewed the second edition of my book, Understanding Environmental Policy, and made this point as they expressed concern about what they saw as my lack urgency about sustainability. According to Bobadilla and Harris:

...one is left wanting a sense of urgency and real actionable tools and solutions. We would argue that the central focus should not be tinkering around the policy edges, but on the rapidly changing climate and the changes we must make in our political, economic, education, communications, and value systems to overcome catastrophe...There is a clear sense that we no longer have time for incremental politics, and that we need a more fundamental change in our way of life.

The problem is that the people in power are not interested in fundamental change, and most people in the developed world are satisfied with their way of life. They want to maintain that way of life. The most powerful political argument for protecting the planet is that to retain what we have, we must gradually change how we deliver the goods and services that people enjoy. The argument that people must give up what they enjoy does not win elections. Moreover, while revolutions often bring great change, they can also bring great suffering.

Malthus, Donella and Dennis Meadows (et.al.) (the authors of The Limits to Growth), and many others have predicted catastrophe for a long time. Each model missed some critical factor when it tried to predict the future. Climate is a serious problem. So too is the prospect of a dirty bomb in a crowded city. Extreme poverty remains a fact of life for far too many people. These are deep problems that require our best thinking to address. Despite the persistence of these problems, I see progress as we learn more about their dimensions and frame methods to address them. Because the problems are complex and the solutions may have unanticipated impacts, an incremental approach minimizes the risk of a catastrophic mistake. Over the past half-century, we have taken that approach, and the result has been progress and the emergence of sustainability as the central issue of our time. I choose to see the glass as half full.]]>How the Transition to Renewable Energy Could Cometag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.75848822015-06-15T08:49:58-04:002015-06-15T10:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/practical or feasible and do not believe it is the "solution" to the problem of global warming, I do believe the transition to renewable energy is practical, feasible and necessary. We need to address the problem of global warming and to do that we need to gradually replace fossil fuels with other forms of energy. Energy is an indispensible ingredient of modern economic life, and the long-term future for fossil fuels is greater expense and greater environmental damage. So if a true price for fossil fuels won't stimulate the transition to a fossil fuel-free economy, what will? I am counting on human ingenuity and technological innovation. But, if I am dismissing higher fossil fuel cost as a way to stimulate innovation, what will stimulate the development and implementation of new energy technology?

To address that question I look to the technological innovations I have seen in my lifetime and ask: How did they come about? I also look to the current reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that we are seeing in the United States and ask: How did they come about?

Technological Innovation

Three of the most dramatic technological changes I've seen include:

Cheaper, smaller and more powerful computers;

The growth of cellular and satellite communications, and;

The development of the Internet.

When I was in graduate school in the late 1970s, we used punch cards to set up and analyze data on a computer that was the size of a small truck. That mainframe had less computing power than the laptop I am writing this on. The price of computing power, as explained by Mr. Moore's famous law, kept coming down and the size of computers kept shrinking. What was the spark that ignited that revolution? It was not the dream of a hand held computer; it was Cold War fear. The Cold War race to develop better and smaller missile guidance systems for the U.S. Department of Defense and lighter/smaller on-board computers for NASA's space program were the starting points for shrinking computers and enhanced communications. In a similar vein, the Internet began as a way for Defense Department computers to share data.

The basic science and technology was funded by the U.S. Government and took place in national and university laboratories. When the technologies matured, some were released for commercial use. The technology that allowed Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to build their first personal computers had its origins in the research and development budgets of the United States government. The formula for technological innovation is straightforward:

Government funding of the basic science and some of the research and development.

Commercialization of these technologies by the private sector.

What worked for computing and communication should work for renewable energy. The trick is to develop renewable energy products that are as reliable, convenient and safe as the current energy system at a price that is lower or at least competitive with the current system. For over seven decades the U.S. government has funded basic science, and some of that science has been used to develop new technology and products. We know how to do this, and a great deal of our nation's wealth has been built on our ability to develop and apply new technologies. This had its roots in America's land-grant colleges and agricultural extension; America's wealth began on America's farms. Government does not invest in businesses, but in scientists and the development of new knowledge and technology. The private sector then decides which of those technologies have the commercial potential to make money in the free market. The next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates will be whoever manages to make a small and cheap solar array, some other form of renewable energy, or a small and cheap energy storage device.

State and Local Policies and Programs

One of the least expensive forms of energy consumption is to not use energy in the first place--or energy efficiency. Technological innovation has a role to play here as well, but so too does management and behavior change. In many cases, organizations and individuals could easily save energy but either they are unaware of the facts, can't be bothered, or do not have the time or capital needed to invest in making their operations more energy efficient. While large-scale, major, new taxes are impossible at the federal level, some states have been able to levy taxes on electricity to provide funds for energy efficiency programs. California and New York are two of these states and they are both national leaders in energy efficiency. In New York, the utility rate structure rewards electric utilities for selling less energy and for promoting energy efficiency. New York City's energy efficiency is growing along with its population.

A number of state and local initiatives to save energy and promote renewable energy are here right now. While not all have succeeded, many have proven track records and state and local governments are learning a great deal about what works and what doesn't work. These on-the-ground solutions are demonstrated success stories. New York State's Energy Research and Development Authority is a pioneer in a wide variety of energy efficiency and renewable energy initiatives. They are partnering with local communities and private firms on microgrids and making long-term commitments to encourage the development of renewable energy. California's Energy Commission has a forty-year history of advancing energy efficiency and renewable energy throughout America's largest state. It has helped make California the most energy efficient state in the country.

The politics of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the state and local level focuses more on day-to-day practical measures and less on grand, macro-policy statements. In New York, Con Ed sends contractors to small businesses to conduct energy audits and suggest steps that they can take--with and without government's help--to save money on their energy bill. While there is always controversy in any action taken by government at any level, these programs have gained traction and appear well on their way to being seen as part of the normal landscape of state and local programs.

A National Climate Policy Agenda

At the national level, the effort by the extreme right to politicize science funding is a deep threat to progress in developing renewable energy technology. I think de-politicizing and increasing basic science funding and funding renewable energy research and development are winnable battles at the federal level. The goal of a clean, high-tech future is easier promote than the goal of reduced consumption of energy due to higher taxes. A positive vision of an optimistic future is an easier sell than predictions of flooding, famine and doom. There may well be a moral imperative to ensure that human production and consumption does not destroy the planet. There is certainly a practical argument against fouling our own nest. But in my view, on a planet of seven billion people, we must be far more careful when we produce and consume goods and services. We should not reduce consumption of the goods and services we believe to be central to our quality of life, but need to develop different types of low-eco-impact economic consumption. The science of earth observation can help us understand the impacts of humans on the planet. More advanced technologies, such as closed-system engineering, can help us increase production while reducing environmental impacts.

In the United States, our political process sends us strong signals about what problems and proposals can achieve agenda status. Increased federal support for science and technology will not be easy, but unlike a carbon tax, it is capable of drawing bipartisan support. States and localities that see the benefits of a modernized energy system have begun to take steps to update their energy systems. The market for distributed or decentralized energy is growing fast enough to cause concern among electric utilities. Americans know that they need to develop alternatives to fossil fuels and are open to new products and programs that will enable them to make greater use of renewable energy. Our climate policies should build on these promising and positive possibilities.]]>A Carbon Tax Is Not Feasible or Practicaltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.75340982015-06-08T08:39:35-04:002015-06-08T20:59:02-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/New York Times once again advocated the adoption of a carbon tax. While the theory of a carbon tax makes perfect sense, its lack of practicality makes it the unicorn of energy politics. It is an imaginary creature of elegance and beauty that has little chance of walking the earth. It is true that greenhouse gas regulations and gasoline taxes are forms of carbon taxes and, as the Times reports, British Columbia has a carbon tax. But the space between the carbon tax as a policy idea and the reality of American politics is too vast to overcome. For better or worse, here in America we are in a period of tax policy paralysis that is unlikely to be surmounted anytime soon. If it is, it will be because the Republicans have achieved control of both the presidency and Congress -- and the agenda will be to cut taxes, not to establish new ones. In my view, the focus of climate policy should not be to raise the price of fossil fuels, but to lower the price of renewable energy. Climate change is a critical public policy issue, but it will not be addressed by policies that have no chance of being adopted.

Advocates of carbon taxes are persistent and influential. According to the New York Times editorial:

In a welcome development, businesses are asking world leaders to do more to address climate change. This week, the top executives of six large European oil and gas companies called for a tax on carbon emissions. These companies -- the BG Group, BP, Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil and Total -- are not taking a bold environmental stand. They are being pragmatic. They want an efficient and predictable policy to limit greenhouse gas emissions because they realize something must be done.

The idea behind the carbon tax is that by raising the price of fossil fuels, one promotes energy efficiency and, as fossil fuels become more expensive, renewable energy technologies will become more competitive. I am certain this is true. But few elected officials are going to advocate higher fossil fuel prices. Moreover, higher energy prices cause people on the lower end of the economic ladder to pay a higher portion of their income on energy. This is because many of the ways we use energy cannot be reduced and poor people often do not have access to the technologies of renewable energy and energy efficiency. Gasoline for your car, heat for your home and electricity for the family refrigerator are often not discretionary but required prerequisites for participation in modern economic life. This is when the simple elegance of the carbon tax breaks down as the complexity of the real world intrudes on the logic of theory. In order to enact a tax we would need to devise ways to reduce its impact on poor people or energy-intensive businesses. The Times editorial discusses these policies, but energy stamps or similar subsidies are far from simple to implement, might stigmatize recipients and would become easy and obvious political targets.

Carbon tax advocates are correct when they assert that tax policy can have a massive impact on behavior, but I think they are approaching the issue backwards. After World War II we wanted to give the average person a greater stake in society and public policy promoted home ownership. Tax policy helped transform America from a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners, but we didn't do it by taxing rent. We did it by making property tax and mortgage interest tax deductible. We also learned how to insure mortgages. In effect we lowered the price of ownership.

In my view, the most practical and equitable way to change energy consumption habits is to lower the price of renewable energy and energy efficiency. We should do it directly. It starts with basic research: government must fund national labs and university-based scientists to advance renewable energy, energy efficiency and energy storage technologies. We can then use tax policy to encourage the rapid commercialization of these technologies. Companies should be encouraged to take risks to get into the business through reduced corporate taxes. Finally, tax policy can be used to encourage consumers to adopt these technologies by lowering their price through tax credits and deductions. When wind and solar power receive favorable tax treatment, their utilization rises, and when these short-term tax policies expire, their utilization declines. Tax expenditures work as well as tax increases and they have the benefit of being politically attractive.

One reason that the carbon tax proposal persists despite its infeasibility is the dominance of economics in modern policy analysis. Politics, history, culture, management and sociology are cast aside. The thinking behind the tax proposal is that the full or true costs of carbon, including its environmental damage, is not included in its price. Include those costs in the price and the market will magically reduce consumption and the tax revenues collected from fossil fuel use can then be used to right the environmental wrongs caused by these fuels. If you assume away the centrality of energy to modern life and assume away politics and the drive for political power, the theory could lead to a practical public policy.

While one could imagine carbon taxes taking root in some jurisdictions, there is no way to ensure that they would be imposed everywhere. Since climate is a global issue, national carbon taxes are insufficient. China and India would need to go along, and given the urgency of their energy and development needs, it is difficult to imagine that they would agree to such a measure.

I sometimes think the push for a carbon tax comes out of an early 20th century environmentalist mindset that scolds people for consumption and living in evil, immoral cities: "Let's punish people for using fossil fuels by assessing a penalty on its use. People should live at one with nature and get back to the land." The problem is that since 2007, most of the world's population has lived in cities. The proportion of urban dwellers continues to grow. Cities are economic and social magnets and it's a good thing they are. There are simply too many people and too little nature for all of us to get back to the land -- even if we wanted to or knew how to live off the land. Most people enjoy the modern, energy-intensive world we live in.

Sustainability advocates need to turn away from the anti-urban roots of the environmental movement and turn to a positive, enabling vision of a 21st century sustainable lifestyle. Instead of punishing people for consuming the "wrong" things let's figure out a way to reward people for consuming the "right" things. Culture, entertainment, education, physical fitness, "wellness" and even "people watching" use few material resources and are attractive, positive elements of a sustainable urban society. People enjoy green spaces, green buildings and the intellectual, social and cultural engagement of the best 21st century cities. These cities can gradually implement renewable energy, modern waste management, water treatment and sustainable mass transit systems. This will enable people to enjoy a sustainable lifestyle in a production system that minimizes rather than maximizes environmental impacts.

A carbon tax is a blunt and infeasible policy instrument. Why waste time and effort on an infeasible policy that will never happen? Why not devote time and effort to building a real partnership between the public and private sector to create a sustainable economy? Let's fund the research, smart grids, and productive capacity needed to lower the cost and environmental impact of energy. Its time to give up on the carbon tax and do the real work that will transform the energy base of the world economy.]]>Sustainable Shipping and EPA's Truck Mileage Standardstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.74833202015-06-01T09:30:06-04:002015-06-02T03:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/New York Times story on the Obama Administration's effort to improve the gas mileage of the same huge trucks I had seen in the distance. These trucks are vital to our economy and ship nearly all of the items we rely on for our daily routines. According to Kessler and Davenport:

This week, the E.P.A. is expected to propose regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-duty trucks, requiring that their fuel economy increase up to 40 percent by 2027, compared with levels in 2010, according to people briefed on the proposal. A tractor-trailer now averages five to six miles a gallon of diesel. The new regulations would seek to raise that average to as much as nine miles a gallon. A truck's emissions can vary greatly, depending on how much it is carrying.

While there are opponents to these new fuel efficiency standards, the opposition is not universal. As the Times story notes, the fuel efficient trucks will cost $12,000-$14,000 more than today's less efficient trucks, but given the amount of gas used by these vehicles and the amount of ground they cover, that cost will be recovered in less than two years. Once the costs are recovered, the financial benefits of improved gas mileage can go to either the bottom line or to lower shipping rates.

As the global economy grows, production becomes increasingly specialized. Inexpensive communication and information, the technology of bar codes, containerized shipping, automated ports and terminals, satellite communication, smartphones and portable computing has made it possible to manufacture goods from components made in dozens, if not hundreds, of places and assembled in yet another place. The huge vertically integrated companies and large factory complexes of the 20th century have been replaced by the networked organization of the 21st. This enables more specialized and efficient production because the cost of shipping is low enough to be easily covered by the reduced costs of production. Shipping of finished products is also increasing as population and consumption increases.

Freight transportation is continuing to increase rapidly and about 70% of all freight in the U.S. is transported by truck. America's settlement pattern, encouraged and serviced by the interstate highway system, is matched by its system of delivering goods to our stores and (due to e-commerce) increasingly to our homes. Europe, with a different settlement pattern, geography and transport system, relies on a system of freight delivery that differs from ours. About 45 percent of its freight is shipped by water, 45 percent by truck and about 10 percent by train. Nevertheless, a key trend in European freight delivery is the growing use of trucks. Back in 1970, 43 percent of the freight in Europe was moved via water, only 35 percent of the freight was carried by truck, and train shipped 22 percent of the goods. European train freight, which declined from 22 percent to 10 percent, is being replaced by truck freight.

Rapidly developing economies like India and China are in the process of rapidly expanding their freight delivery systems, as are the economies in other parts of the world. The decentralization of production makes truck transportation cost-effective and less reliant on centralized facilities such as ports and freight terminals. In other words, we should expect to see a world with many more trucks in the future than the number we have today.

The growing use of trucks to transport freight poses significant technological challenges in the effort to move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Air transport presents similar challenges. While we have the technology to build an electric car and power it with renewable energy, the scale and weight of truck, ship and air transport provide a deeper challenge to efforts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. Fuels based on grains hold some promise, but in general there has been less focus on renewable large vehicle transport than renewable personal transportation. We are far from having the technology needed to shift off of fossil fuel-based trucks, ships and jets.

The Times story reminded me of the complexity of our economy and the infrastructure that supports it. Trucks use non-renewable energy, pollute the air, and contribute to climate change. They also cause congestion when they compete with autos for road space. Their weight can damage our already deteriorating bridge and highway infrastructure and their total costs are not always included in the taxes and user fees that they now pay.

Despite these issues, there is no turning back from this system of production, transport and delivery. The global economy has a life and logic of its own. Like a gravity-fed water system, it all flows downhill. Its momentum is irresistible because we all benefit from its efficiency and its effectiveness. The people who work on the logistics of shipping are constantly searching for cheaper, faster and more reliable methods of transportation. Arguably, shipping is one of the most competitive and complex businesses in the world. Each jurisdiction has its own rules and fees and the threat of terrorism has created inspections and bottlenecks at many national points of entry.

Technology is being developed to deal with these threats, delays and complexity. The growing interconnectedness of the world economy virtually assures that these problems will be brought under control in order to facilitate the increased flow of goods and raw materials throughout the world. If sustainability advocates attempt to prevent these trends, they will find themselves on the wrong side of economic history. Instead, an effort must be made to make the shipping system as efficient as possible and work to reduce its inevitable impact on ecosystems and environmental quality.

Improving fuel efficiency in trucks is a good example of such an enlightened policy. We need to motivate scientists, engineers and corporations to add energy efficiency to the design parameters for new trucks. When this was done with household appliances, such as refrigerators and air conditioners, we were able to generate dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. For example, trucks generate enormous amounts of heat; perhaps there is some way to utilize that energy instead of venting it. Since fuel is a major cost element in the shipping business, there is plenty of motivation to develop trucks that require less of it to deliver the same amount of goods.

We can also use congestion fees to rationalize the use of roadways and other taxes to pay the full cost of highway maintenance and construction. We can pay serious attention to the environmental impacts of new shipping facilities of every type. Transportation should be steered away from fragile and critical ecological resources. An enlightened and sustainable system of freight transport requires an active and forward-looking government. The U.S. national government has a critical role to play. This will require research, regulation, and creative use of taxation. President Obama's action last week indicates that he is aware of the need to act. If he is replaced in 2017 by the same type of anti-government leadership we have in congress today, the U.S. will fall even further behind in our efforts to understand and sustainably participate in the growing global economy.]]>The Right Wing's Endless War on Environmental Regulationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.74413722015-05-26T08:45:43-04:002015-05-26T10:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
According to Coral Davenport's report in last week's New York Times:

The E.P.A. proposed the rule, known as Waters of the U.S., last March. The agency has held more than 400 meetings about it with outside groups and read more than one million public comments as it wrote the final language. The rule is being issued under the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave the federal government broad authority to limit pollution in major water bodies, like Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River and Puget Sound, as well as streams and wetlands that drain into larger waters. But two Supreme Court decisions related to clean water protection, in 2001 and in 2006, created legal confusion about whether the federal government had the authority to regulate the smaller streams and headwaters...E.P.A. officials say the new rule will clarify that authority, allowing the government to once again limit pollution in those smaller bodies of water -- although it does not restore the full scope of regulatory authority granted by the 1972 law. The E.P.A. also contends that the new rule will not give it the authority to regulate additional waters that had not been covered under the 1972 law. People familiar with the rule say it will apply to about 60 percent of the nation's waters.

Since water sources drain into each other, efforts to regulate pollution in "major" lakes and rivers require the regulation of pollution in smaller streams, tributaries and wetlands. Unfortunately, none of the Supreme Court Justices are hydrologists, and their 2001 and 2006 rulings did not reflect this basic fact of environmental science; their rulings (excuse the pun) muddied the waters.

As Davenport and others have reported, the interest group reaction to EPA's new rule has been intense. The American Farm Bureau Federation believes it will reduce the value of farmland dramatically. The usual ideologues are making the usual noises about big, intrusive government and job-killing regulations. Some time down the road (or should I say downstream?) when we all end up paying additional billions to treat our drinking water and clean up toxic wetlands and waterways, these same special interests will complain about wasteful government spending.

Environmental protection is typically about smaller costs up front, at least when compared to huge costs once pollution has occurred and remediation must take place. It's pay me now or pay me later. Cleaning up the oil spilling into the ocean by Santa Barbara will cost much more than preventing the leak would have cost. But of course, preventing the leak would require more "overreaching by government" and "job-killing regulations."

We pay for this ideological idiocy. Ask BP now that they are spending $20 billion to clean up the Gulf of Mexico if they wished they'd spent a few million more to better manage their drilling contractors. The complaint that regulations prevent economic growth is an old one and is just as fictitious now as it has ever been. Auto manufacturers once claimed that seat belts and catalytic convertors would bankrupt their businesses. Bar owners in New York City once complained that banning smoking would destroy their business. I see lots of cars on the road and more people in New York City's bars than ever. People like safe, less polluting cars and it turns out that the market for smoke-free bars was larger than the one for smoke-filled bars.

Before EPA was created in 1970, economic growth and pollution were both increasing rapidly. By 1980, after regulation kicked in, pollution started to drop and, with few exceptions, economic growth and pollution reductions have continued ever since. While some regulations are misguided, typically bad rules are corrected before they do much damage. But in an increasingly complex world economy, the free market cannot function effectively without clear and reasonable rules. At some point, we will need to drop this absurd mindset that all rules are bad and start focusing on improving the regulatory structure to maximize benefits and minimize costs. The day of complete freedom for businesses to operate any way they want never really existed, but certainly in today's high-tech, highly-networked, global economy, such freedom is not even remotely possible.

People who manage global businesses understand this, expect rules, and hope to influence their development or manipulate their implementation to their competitive advantage. In fact, the absence of rules, or in the case of the U.S., state-by-state rules, can create confusion and uncertainty that makes business operations complex and difficult to manage. Nevertheless, conservative extremists are attempting to delegitimize rulemaking and governance itself. This anti-authoritarian impulse is deeply problematic. The world is filled with dangers. Everything from global terror to toxic waste poses threats to human health and wellbeing. Rules of law apply to many aspects of our economic and social life. The alternative to a world of law is not a world of freedom but a world of chaos, terror and danger.

A very active effort underway in congress is to attach bans on environmental regulation to statutes needed for the government to function. The threat of a presidential veto is one of the few remaining weapons that environmental advocates still possess to resist these destructive measures. The right wing is also trying to prevent regulation by starving EPA of funding for inspections, environmental monitoring, research, and enforcement. The Toxic Substances Control Act is so under-funded that it typically takes many years for new chemicals to be tested for regulation.

Conservatives will discover, as their great hero Ronald Reagan learned over 30 years ago, that support for protecting the environment runs deep in the American political culture. Polling measures the ebb and flow of this political support, but it is a mistake to assume that Americans do not care about clean air and clean water. They assume that government is taking care of this problem. Just as they assume that the police and military will keep them safe, Americans assume that government will prevent the poisoning of their air, water and food. When the public sees the government losing interest in environmental protection, support for the environment spikes in the polls.

The right wing attack on environmental regulation is a fundamental political mistake. Conservatives are correct in assuming that Americans mistrust big organizations and powerful institutions, but they should remember that the public counts on these powerful organizations to protect them. Attacking government inefficiency and overreach is often a popular political message, but attacking government practices that protect the health of American families is a losing one. American environmental law was born in a bipartisan partnership. This past week, Columbia's Earth Institute posted a video of a semester-long class taught last year on the origins of our environmental law by Leon Billings and Tom Jorling, the Republican and Democratic senate staff leaders who worked across the aisle to help develop these path-breaking laws. We once knew how to be the world's leader in developing creative and cost-effective environmental rules. We should learn from our own history and figure out a way to end the war on the environment and move forward once again.]]>Lessons of the Move From Hybrids Back to SUVstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.73051602015-05-18T10:11:30-04:002015-05-18T10:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/The New York Times reported that lower gasoline prices were reducing the market for hybrid and electric cars. Ulrich observed that:

"Affordable gasoline is making hybrid car owners rethink their loyalty. With bargain gasoline prices putting more money in the pockets of Americans, owners of hybrids and electric vehicles are defecting to sport utility vehicles and other conventional models powered only by gasoline, according to Edmunds.com, an auto research firm. There are limits, it appears, to how far consumers will go to own a car that became a rolling statement of environmental concern. In 2012, with gas prices soaring, an owner could expect a hybrid to pay back its higher upfront costs in as little as five years. Now, that oft-calculated payback period can extend to 10 years or more."

This shift in consumer attitudes demonstrates that mass behaviors that lead to a sustainable and renewable economy will not come from a simple desire to protect the environment. Hybrids and electric cars are more expensive than traditional autos and as long as that is the case, they will have difficulty competing with them. Price, quality, reliability and convenience all factor into consumer decisions and no one should be surprised that lower gasoline prices changes the consumer's calculus.

It is a mistake, however, to assume that these choices indicate a reduction in support for protecting the environment. But transportation is a complicated phenomenon. In the developing world, the use of cars is expanding at a ferocious rate. Automobiles are both a status symbol and a means of transport in the developing world. Here in the United States, our pattern of land use development requires automobiles--or, at a minimum, some form of personal transportation. Nevertheless, many people are getting tired of congestion and some are seeking mass transit alternatives or more urban lifestyles. According to the American Public Transportation Association: "Americans took 10.8 billion trips on public transportation in 2014, which is the highest annual public transit ridership number in 58 years." I suspect the lure of the open road has come to an end with the end of truly open roads. As soon as we build a road to relieve congestion, people take advantage of the new roads and move further out of town. Before long, the new road is congested and the cycle repeats itself. More and more Americans spend more and more time stuck in traffic. In the New York region, the network of Robert Moses--built parkways, beautiful winding landscaped highways--has now been retrofitted for modern commuting. Taking a Sunday "pleasure" drive is a distant memory for many. We drive to get places, not for the pleasure of movement or to enjoy the scenery.

The electric car will achieve higher market share when prices come down, charging is more convenient and less frequent, and gasoline rises in price. Few people are in love with the internal combustion engine and a cheap, convenient and reliable electric car would win in the marketplace. But the movement away from hybrids to larger cars provides an excellent example of the limits of "responsible consumerism." Like corporate social responsibility, these notions only work when they line up with self-interest. Enlightened self-interest makes sense. Consumer and corporate behavior is by definition about self-interest. Corporations are organized to make money. Consumers spend their money on goods and services that provide maximum benefit. We want their behavior to be "responsible" and it is good when they get there on their own, but it makes little sense to build a system around altruism.

If society wants corporations and individuals to behave a certain way, then the market must be structured through law, regulation, and the tax system. It is possible and necessary to use government to bring about sustainable corporate and individual behavior. In small ways, this is already underway. Take the example of streaming music and video. Most of the basic science of the Internet was invented in government laboratories and in university labs funded by the U.S. government. Back in the days of Blockbuster Video and Tower Records, we would buy or rent physical CDs, tapes, records, and DVDs. Massive amounts of resources were devoted to these forms of home entertainment. Today, brick and mortar stores and physical media have been replaced by products that do not need to be manufactured, shipped or packaged and do not require warehouses or physical retail outlets.

Remove the Defense Department's research on the Internet and we are back at Tower Records or Blockbuster shopping for entertainment. Whatever the virtues of that social interaction (and I admit that I miss record stores and hope that book stores survive), streaming video consumes far fewer material resources than mass production and distribution of physical media.

I know the Republican right wing thinks that government should not be picking winners and losers for business investment, and I suspect they are correct. But that does not mean we cannot define socially irresponsible corporate and individual behavior as illegal or unwanted and structure public policy to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. That is why charitable donations and mortgage interest can be deducted from your income for tax purposes. As a nation, we want to encourage charity and home ownership. That is hardwired into our tax system and is long-established public policy. Similarly, we should want to encourage energy and water efficiency, recycling, better waste management, and the use of renewable resources in every sector of the economy.

If hybrid and electric cars fail in the marketplace, we need to make better and more competitive hybrid and electric cars. Shaming people into buying these cars is a waste of time. Instead, we need to excite consumers about the excellent features and lower price of the newly designed vehicles, once they are developed.

The movement for corporate responsibility is related to the effort to make consumers feel guilty for buying irresponsible products made by irresponsible corporations. People should be made aware of what they are buying and how it is made. And this awareness can and does have an impact on the market. However, the attempt to shame consumers helps create a negative image of environmentalists as scolds and people who want you to "do without." You know: Turn off the lights, don't drink bottled water, don't drive big cars, don't eat meat, keep the house cold in winter and hot in the summer, don't water the lawn... This list goes on and is the very definition of a losing political strategy.

Modern economic life is not about denial but about fulfillment. The key is to redefine that fulfillment in ways that do not destroy the ecosystems that provide us with the air, water and food we rely on. The hidden hand of the market is a tool in that redefinition process, but the visible hand of government and public policy is needed as well. Build an economy that emphasizes ideas, health, wellness, fitness, entertainment, art, culture and media and de-emphasizes more and more material consumption. Focus on economic "software" rather than hardware.

The lesson of the move from hybrids to SUVs is that consumer choice must be fully understood as we make the transition to a sustainable economy. My wife and I bought a car last summer and the factors that dominated our choice were safety, price and reliability. We don't drive very much (less than 3,000 miles a year) and we are far from a typical consumer. We looked at hybrids, but in the end, could not find one that met our needs. If we want to encourage autos that are more fuel efficient, and ultimately cars that rely on renewable energy, we need to start with the factors that influence consumer choice. Incentives and rules can be developed that increase the probability that people will purchase the product that is best for the planet. If we combine the power of the market with the power of government we can gradually make the transition to a sustainable economy without too much pain and with a minimum of guilt.]]>A Reason to Be Optimistic: The New Generation of Sustainability Professionalstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.72559662015-05-11T08:22:06-04:002015-05-11T21:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
While I have a number of jobs at Columbia, the one that I care most about is the one that allows me to be an educator. I serve as the director of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management, a partnership between the Earth Institute and the School of Continuing Education, and I direct the Master of Public Administration (MPA) in Environmental Science and Policy, a partnership between the Institute and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). I also direct the sustainability concentration in SIPA's Executive MPA program. These programs enroll about 300 students and this year nearly 150 will graduate and take their place in the growing field of sustainability management, policy and operations.

The other degree programs sponsored by Columbia's Earth Institute in collaboration with schools at Columbia include:

None of these programs existed before 2002. All provide rigorous, hands on education in sustainability science, policy and management, and all are evolving rapidly. Our faculty are quickly adapting to the changing needs of this rapidly growing field. In my case, it has required that I expand my knowledge of private sector management and finance. In fact, the fast-growing field of sustainability finance has created demand for new courses on green accounting and sustainability metrics, and at Columbia this fall we are launching a new certification program in sustainability finance.

This is not just happening at Columbia. Here in New York, the City University has launched a number of new sustainability programs, as has the New School and Bard College. Bard has begun the region's first green MBA program. And of course, sustainability education is not limited to New York. The Bren School of Management at UC Santa Barbara has been at this longer than anyone else. The Atkinson School of Management at Willamette University has a sustainability concentration and Arizona State University, under Earth Institute founder and ASU President Michael Crow, has a thriving set of programs in its path-breaking School of Sustainability. Last week, I had the honor of visiting with the excellent faculty and students of one of the nation's newest sustainability masters programs at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. This program is ending its first year of operation and I watched its students present superb capstone workshop projects undertaken for local clients on key sustainability issues. I even got to hear a project completed for Sustain Charlotte, an organization founded by Shannon Binns, a graduate of Columbia's MPA in Environmental Science and Policy.

All of this growth and student interest is inspiring. I started studying environmental policy in 1975 under the late Lester Milbrath, the environmental politics professor at SUNY Buffalo. I remember that fall he taught a seminar on environmental politics to about a dozen reasonably skeptical graduate students. We read The Limits to Growth, Mankind at the Turning Point and An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, and tried to understand the root causes of what we called "the environmental probelmatique". Today, thousands are learning about these issues and working on practical solutions to some of the world's most daunting problems. Here at Columbia, most of our sustainability programs feature pro-bono capstone projects for public and non-profit clients. The group I advised this spring did a high-quality study for the State of New York's Department of Environmental Conservation on the costs of cleaning up marine debris (garbage in the water) in the New York region. Our client was another one of our alums, Venetia Lannon, the head of the New York City regional office of New York State's environmental agency.

I am providing all this detail not just to brag about what sustainability educators are accomplishing, but also to convey the excitement and energy in this growing field. These students are dedicated and mission driven. Our faculty is attracted to this field for the same reason, and has the luxury of feeding off the optimism and can-do spirit of our students. Of course, that energy and enthusiasm is both a blessing and a curse. The downside is that sometimes the enthusiasm descends into a mindless groupthink and an urge toward political correctness. Our job as sustainability educators is to provide students with the analytic tools and conceptual framework to challenge easy answers. The problems of creating a sustainable economy are difficult. There are no easy answers. Many of the issues we teach about require tough tradeoffs. Our job is to provide the means for our students to perform the sophisticated analyses required to undertake critical thinking. In my view, that analytic rigor is what separates high quality from low quality sustainability education.

Sustainability issues are not simple. A case in point is a controversy at Six Flags amusement park that was in the news this past weekend. Six Flags is thinking of cutting down several acres of forest to put up a small solar farm. They want to reduce greenhouse gases and save money. But of course, they have not yet done an analysis of the environmental services provided by the small forest. What ecosystems are damaged if the trees are cut? Will the tree-cutting impair groundwater? What will it do to drainage and does it increase the cost of flooding? What happens if and when solar cells get smaller and more efficient and require less space? I do not know the answers to these questions, but a well-educated sustainability professional should be capable of leading or conducting an analysis to address those issues.

The task before sustainability educators is to take the inspiring energy and enthusiasm of our students and channel it into an effort to develop the conceptual and analytic tools needed to conduct high quality management and policy analyses. I've been involved in this work for many years and I find that while my students often start their studies as advocates and activists, many complete their studies as analysts and professionals. They still care deeply about the planet and its wellbeing, but they have the tools to speak truth to power and to even achieve power themselves.

Student interest in this field is a source of great optimism and hope. What gives me an even greater sense of hope is the growing number of Chinese students seeking to study sustainability in our universities. Over the past year I've read many emotional and heartfelt admissions essays by Chinese applicants to our programs, all focused on China's increasingly toxic air, water and land. They are eager to learn more about these problems and to help shape solutions. I know that many projections of our environmental future are bleak. These projections do not account for the brainpower, creativity, and ingenuity of this coming generation of sustainability professionals. They are the future, and in my view, the best guarantee of a sustainable global economy.]]>Federal Dysfunction Continues to Underfund Science and Infrastructuretag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.72037002015-05-04T09:40:28-04:002015-05-04T09:59:02-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
In what some might consider an unrelated development, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that investment in American port facilities was lagging behind demand. Inadequate port facilities were causing delays and increased shipping costs as our ports struggled to handle the volume generated by a new generation of super-sized freight ships. According to Wall Street Journal reporters Arian Campo-Flores and Cameron McWhirter:

The problem didn't happen overnight. Investment by federal, state and local governments in U.S. ports and surrounding infrastructure--such as roads and rail lines--mostly dried up during the recession. And declining cargo volumes squeezed ports' finances, limiting their ability to make significant investments in bigger cranes and other improvements... Now, ports are scrambling to catch up. They lag some foreign counterparts, which rely on unmanned cargo-handling machines to efficiently move, stack and retrieve containers.

The problem was even recognized by our dysfunctional Federal House of Representatives which last week passed a spending bill that would provide more funding for American ports. But as Robbie Whelan of the Wall Street Journal reported:

The plan passed by a relatively comfortable 240-177 vote. But it faces an uncertain future in a full Congress that has been unable to pass annual spending bills in most recent years and is likely to advance a continuing resolution later this year that would do little more than carry current spending levels forward.

Funding ports and scientific research should be ideologically neutral pieces of consensus in American politics. But in the toxic environment of the American Congress we can't even do the easy stuff. For the Republican right-wing, all government actions seem to be illegitimate. They appear to give the military a pass, but according to the Tea Party, little else that government does is worth doing.

This is the result of decades of attacks on government starting over 50 years ago with Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential campaign and continuing with Ronald Reagan's 1980 Presidential campaign when Reagan declared that government could not help solve America's problems because America's government was the cause of America's problems. That once extreme position has now become an almost centrist truism. When Goldwater expressed these views in his 1964 speech accepting the Republican nomination he felt compelled to defend his extremism making the argument that: "... extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Today, Goldwater would probably be seen as a moderate. The delegitimizing of the federal government is so hardwired into our political culture that doubts about the utility of our national government have become an accepted part of our political center.

In a time when the global economy places us in constant competition with other nations, our inability to forge effective public-private partnerships may well be the greatest long-term threat to America's economic and political power. Much of our post-World War II wealth was derived from the science and engineering innovations that originated in our national laboratories and in America's great research universities. Alone among the great powers, America invested billions in defense and non-defense science and technology. The research produced in American laboratories would find their way into consumer products ranging from refrigerators to computers; from medicines to smart phones; from food to the internet.

We developed an amazing research capacity by allowing scientists utilizing merit-based peer review to govern research priorities and funding. Today, Congress has decided to interfere with that successful tradition. The politicization of science may have been inevitable, but it is a slippery slope. Some of the causes of this trend relate to scientists attempting to deploy their knowledge in political debate. Their expertise and ability in science doesn't always translate well into a deep understanding of politics, economics and culture. Nevertheless the main cause of the politicization of science has not been unsophisticated advocacy by scientists, but the growing force of money in politics. Entrenched interests do not typically support development of transformational technologies that might impair their economic dominance. The fossil fuel companies are not interested in Tesla developing a $300 (not $3,000) battery that stores energy for two weeks instead of two hours. They don't trust the science establishment to protect their interests; they rely on their allies in the Congress for that.

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health should be given broad and general policy direction and then be allowed to set their own priorities. The lawyers in Congress do not know enough to get into the scientific weeds and they should be more judicious in their efforts to assert democratic control. While I do not question their right and responsibility to govern this part of the government, I worry about their use of ideological lenses to do so. While the scientific method and rational thought can be seen as an ideology too, it provides a perspective for relatively free inquiry that is central to the growth of knowledge and innovation. While I hope we can all agree that the growth of knowledge and new patterns of thought and discovery are worthwhile goals, I know that not everyone thinks so.

One would think that investments in ports and roads and maybe even mass transit would be less controversial than science. Nevertheless, if government and taxation are our enemies, then infrastructure investment is just as tough as funding science. This is a return of sorts to our American roots. When New York's DeWitt Clinton proposed the Erie Canal, President Thomas Jefferson refused to support it and a few years later President James Madison vetoed a bill to fund it. Clinton relied on state and private funding to build the canal, which had a profound effect on the development of New York City and State, leading to commercial dominance that in New York City continues to this day. The Erie Canal may well be the most successful infrastructure investment in American history.

When Americans travel abroad and see high-speed rail in Europe and Asia, and walk through airports that are far more advanced than the ones we build at home, they are seeing the impact of government infrastructure investment on daily economic life. When our cars bounce on poorly paved roads, or we wait for hours to receive underfunded government services, it is important to understand that we are seeing the impact of anti-government ideology in action.

The capitalist marketplace can do many things, but it can't do everything. Modern economic life requires that government play an active role in building and financing common resources. Transportation, communication, water, energy, security, health, education, research and environmental protection all require an active government. Many of these activities are best pursued when government, non-profits and private for profit organizations work together as part of a team. However, as long as our federal government's dysfunction continues to underfund science and infrastructure, we will be unable to develop the types of partnerships needed to compete in the 21st century's brain-based global economy.]]>From PlaNYC to OneNYC: New York's Evolving Sustainability Policytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.71511442015-04-27T09:34:35-04:002015-06-27T05:59:02-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
The different goals of our very distinct mayors reflect the different conditions they inherited when they assumed office. Mayor Bloomberg took office less than one hundred days after the horror of the World Trade Center's destruction. Our confidence was low and the city's economic viability was under threat. Bloomberg's steady, business-like approach and his focus on management and economic development reassured New Yorkers and led to a decade of renewal. In 2008 and 2009, the shock of the Great Recession further reinforced the need to create a city attractive to businesses that would bring energy, creativity, money and employment to the City.

Mayor de Blasio took office in a revived city, but one that many working and middle class residents were struggling to afford. Occupy Wall Street placed extreme income inequality on the political agenda. Policing and racial profiling had become a political issue and Bill de Blasio was able to dominate the Democratic mayoral race with a clear articulation of what he termed "progressive values and principles." Anyone observing the mayor's first 16 months can see that unless the goal relates directly to his overall progressive agenda, it has trouble gaining traction. Sustainability seemed to flounder until the mayor and his team found a way to integrate it into his social and economic equity agenda.

That is the good news. The bad news is that as influential as New York City might be, it does not have the capacity to lift 800,000 people out of poverty. The anti-poverty goal set by OneNYC is laudable, but not under the city's control. New York can create and implement universal pre-K, a critical element of an anti-poverty program. It can provide municipal IDs and can undertake a variety of other equity-oriented initiatives. But in the end, New York City's powers are limited and derived from the State of New York's claims to sovereignty under American federalism. Mayor Bloomberg learned the limits of his power to implement PlaNYC when the state legislature defeated congestion pricing. PlaNYC tried, but did not accomplish, increased spending on mass transit and a reduction in motor vehicle traffic in New York's central business district. Mayor de Blasio can propose and envision an anti-poverty program just as he can propose and envision a Utica Avenue subway (an ancient dream of those of us from Flatlands), but he has little power to achieve either of those goals.

I assume the Mayor knows all this. He is travelling all over the country because he knows that the issue of income redistribution is a national political issue, not an issue that can be addressed at the municipal level. What concerns me as it relates to sustainability planning is that while sustainability is hitched to a goal that the mayor believes is vital, it is not a goal that city governments can do much about. In contrast, the goal of local economic development is a principle function of local government. Mayor Bloomberg linked sustainability to economic development, a goal that the mayor of New York has a wide range of tools to influence. An abbreviated list of mayoral economic development powers include: zoning, building codes, the implementation of tax-based economic development incentives, purchasing, infrastructure construction through the capital budget and deployment of city assets ranging from police to parks.

The issue of income distribution requires national economic and tax policy. While a local war on poverty is not feasible, local governments can do a great deal to promote upward mobility. For a local government like New York City, poverty reduction is accomplished indirectly through the public programs that provide housing and rent subsidies, along with investments in improved schools, libraries, parks and transit. Public safety and low-cost health care also make it possible for New York to maintain a diverse population. Funding all of these local programs costs money and so New York has worked for many years to attract businesses and wealthy people.

One of the success stories of the Bloomberg administration was making the city attractive to the international elite. However, one of the outcomes of that attraction is that real estate prices all over the city are rising quickly and increasing the cost of housing for long-time residents and their children. The delicate public policy issue that is within mayoral control is: How do we encourage the wealthy to participate in our real estate market without driving out the rest of us? How can the city tax some of the new real estate wealth to provide housing subsidies for working New Yorkers? Wealthy non-residents own a growing number of the city's high-priced condos; some only stay in town once in a while and may have bought the place as an investment. This type of ownership reduces the supply of housing and indirectly may increase its price for people who want to live here. "Set asides" and other policies can be used to fund housing for people who aren't rich. Otherwise, given the stress on the real estate market, it won't be long before poverty will be reduced in New York City because poor people simply can't afford the cost of our housing. There'll be less poor people in the city because they'll all live in Long Island or New Jersey.

It is clear that the mayor's team understands the housing challenge, but its integration into the sustainability and anti-poverty goals are less clear. In my view, the goal of lifting people out of poverty is not a local issue. On the other hand, retaining a diverse population is a central and achievable goal of New York City's government. This is one of the goals of OneNYC. Under Vision 1, "our growing thriving city," the plan advocates a simple goal for housing: "New Yorkers will have access to affordable, high-quality housing coupled with robust infrastructure and neighborhood services." The de Blasio plan advocates the use of city land to build one to four family homes for working and middle class families; holistic community-based planning to promote new housing, and mandatory "inclusionary housing" to require developers to build subsidized housing units when they build market rate units.

One test of these OneNYC initiatives will come when a housing development is proposed on a piece of land that is needed for a green infrastructure project, or when a proposed housing development stresses local infrastructure or environmental quality. These are solvable problems, although they may require tough trade-off choices. A second, central test will be the transformation of many of the aspirational, visionary goals of OneNYC into specific, operational management indicators. Enlightened vision is good, but tangible, on-the-ground, measurable performance is better. Let's have both.]]>Earth Day's Importance and Evolution Since 1970tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.70995222015-04-20T08:46:52-04:002015-06-20T05:59:01-04:00Steven Cohenhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/
Republicans and Democrats worked together on all of the environmental policies formulated during EPA's first decade. Policies to regulate water, air, toxics, solid waste, and hazardous waste were all enacted in the decade that followed the first Earth Day. That incredibly creative and important period ended when the "lame duck" Congress of December, 1980, passed the Superfund Toxic Waste clean-up bill, and when President Jimmy Carter signed an Executive Order giving EPA the authority to implement the new program on the day before he left office.

The first real effort to turn back the clock on environmental protection was attempted during the first two yeas of the Reagan Administration. Reagan appointed an anti-environmental administrator of EPA, Anne Gorsuch-Burford, and an even more reactionary Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. However, the bipartisan consensus behind environmental protection was so strong that in May, 1983, then-President Ronald Regan asked EPA's first administrator, William ("Mr. Clean") Ruckelshaus to return to head the agency. In May 1984, New York Times environmental reporter Phillip Shabecoff reported that:

One year after his return as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, William D. Ruckelshaus is widely credited with restoring morale, stability, purpose and credibility to an agency he found in a state of chaos.

Three decades later, we find the issue of environmental protection has evolved in a number of important ways. Environmental pollution is widely seen as a public health issue and broad public support for a clean environment is as strong today as it was in the first decade after Earth Day. Moreover, the issue of global sustainability and the connection of the planet's environmental health to our economic wellbeing have moved from the fringes of the political agenda to its center. Sustainability is at or near the top of the modern global political agenda. At the core of that agenda is the need to:

Develop businesses that minimize environmental impacts and maximize the use of renewable resources.

Except in the halls of the American Congress, these goals are not particularly controversial and are at the heart of the mission and vision of 2015's Earth Day. Environmental protection is no longer simply cleaning up pollution after we've released it into our air, land and water, but is one element of an effort to build a sustainable economy. We have learned that there is a deep connection between economic wellbeing and a healthy environment. When we release toxics into ecosystems, we may gain short-term economic benefits, but before long the economic cost of clean up and of health impacts are far higher than the short-term benefits of dirty economic production. This fact of economic life has caused many people to question the premise of a trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth. Economic growth depends on the resources produced by a healthy, well-functioning set of ecosystems.

More important, humans are living organisms. We are not immune from the negative impacts of toxics released into the environment. People in Beijing are suffering from the impacts of dirty air. People in West Virginia last year went many days without being able to drink water from their faucets. Even wealthy people cannot fully insulate themselves from the negative effects of toxics in the air--you cannot build a gated community that will keep out air pollution.

We have learned a great deal about our planet and about human ingenuity since the first Earth Day was observed in 1970. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, we saw our economy and our pollution loads increase in tandem. This continued through the 1970s, but by the 1980s, the impact of environmental regulation in the United States started to bear fruit. We saw the GDP grow and the absolute levels of pollution start to decrease. For the most part, those trends have continued ever since. We have learned that we can grow our economy without destroying our natural resources. We've learned that we do not have to trade off economic growth against protection of the environment. We can develop technologies such as catalytic converters for cars, scrubbers for smoke stacks, advanced forms of sewage treatment and closed system manufacturing plants that enable our productivity to increase while our pollutant levels decrease.

We still have a lot to learn. We continue to extract and burn fossil fuels at a ferocious and destructive rate. The transition to a renewable resource based economy will be the theme of Earth Days for the next several decades. The institutional inertia and sunk costs of elements of the economy that depend on finite resources will not be easily addressed. Writing in the New York Times this past weekend, Diane Cardwell reported on the battle between the fast growing solar energy industry and state regulated electric utilities. She noted that some utilities:

...are struggling to adapt to the growing popularity of making electricity at home, which puts new pressures on old infrastructure like circuits and power lines and cuts into electric company revenue. As a result, many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. In response, those solar companies are fighting back through regulators, lawmakers and the courts. The shift in the electric business is no less profound than those that upended the telecommunications and cable industries in recent decades. It is already remaking the relationship between power companies and the public while raising questions about how to pay for maintaining and operating the nation's grid.

As Cardwell observes, the rapidly advancing technology of the solar industry is something we have seen in other parts of our economy. Streaming video online is replacing cable TV. Cell phones are replacing landlines. The march of technology and the impact of human brainpower is a fact of modern life.

The issue for Earth Day, 2015, is how we marshal the forces of technology toward the goal of creating a sustainable, high-throughput economy. Some of these new technologies will damage our environment. Some, like solar power, can help protect the environment. We need to develop 21st century laws and regulations to police and steer these new technologies to ensure their benefits outweigh their costs. We need to invest in a comprehensive system of earth observation built on sound environmental science in order to more fully understand the impact of new technologies.

When Earth Day began 45 years ago, we did not know what threats the planet would face today. Some may have assumed by 2015 we would already be exploring new planets. What we have learned over these past four and a half decades is that we need this planet if we are to survive as a species. And we can manage this planet's resources if we apply our hearts and minds to that task. We have made a great deal of progress since the first Earth Day, but we have a long way to go. Let's keep going.]]>